[Sca-cooks] Pound Cake: Was Cake Docs

[Elise Fleming]

Caointiarn wrote:
> There is one reference in the Martha Washington book  -- for
curran
>cake.  waiting on a cookbook from colonial williamsburg {hopefully
with
>original recipes}  ... (snip).  I hadn't thought to take "pound"
cake literally,
> just to find out more about the dense cakes we now call pound
cakes.

Interesting!  Do other folk out there call dense cakes "pound"
cakes?  My experience with store bought (and homemade) pound cakes
is that of a yellow, dense cake but not the dense type in late
period cookery books, which usually contain spices and raisins,
currants, etc.  Larousse says that pound cakes "are made with equal
weights of flour, sugar, butter, and eggs.  The mixing method and
the order in which the ingredients are added varies according to the
recipe.  The cake can be flavoured with vanilla, lemon, orange,
etc."

I've found an early pound cake recipe in _The First American
Cookbook, A Facsimile of "American Cookery"_, 1796 by Amelia
Simmons.  It says "one pound sugar, one pound butter, one pound
flour, one pound or ten eggs, rose water one gill, spices to your
taste; watch it well, it will bake in a slow oven in 15 minutes."
There are several other cookery books from the early 1800s which
include pound cakes.

Mrs. McLintock's _Receipts for Cookery and Pastry-Work_ (1736) does
not contain any cake recipes with equal amounts per Larousse's
description.  Neither does Edward Kidder's _Receipts of Pastry &
Cookery for the Use of His Scholars" which is from 1720-1740.

Alys Katharine